SIX is really 4.something, but SIX is better than 5, right?
Yeah. About that. It’s probably best not to ask.

Fortunately I’m not on call and the bottles of Delerium Tremens (details via http://www.delirium.be) currently sitting in a cool dark spot at home could be instrumental in helping me forget for a while.

Anyway, RO5.x is what we have in use, although I’m thinking that a multicore version might not be adequately labelled if it says 5.×.
Such a big change would require the stable version to be a number higher than 5

Without having to load the 32bit CLib plus rattling though the !boot twice.

The “boot twice” is unavoidable as a reboot is required to switch to the new OS. Have you tried not loading CLib and using the ROM version?

I don’t recall why I softloaded CLib in the boot sequence but guess there must have been a reason. I wasn’t even aware it was an issue, certainly haven’t seen any problems on any of the OS versions I test with, which is all major builds from 3.71 thru 6.x and 5.x nightlies.

Such a big change would require the stable version to be a number higher than 5

Well, Clive suggested 7. It could be 6, because SIX != 6. But probably best be seven. Seven gets a good showing in biblical stories. And we all know what became of six…

As for when and where CLib is loaded in the boot sequence … I was wrong. The initial start-up does this:

RMEnsure SharedCLibrary 5.43 Error This !Boot structure requires
SharedCLibrary version 5.43 or later

which is rather missing a chance to ensure the most recent CLib is loaded before anything else.

That said, in this day and age, it’s only of relevence to those clutching the dying carcasses of aging RiscPCs. For the new hardware, the latest ROM images come with the most recent CLib baked in, so there’s nothing to worry about loading.

As someone who wrote a tool to log what goes on in the boot sequence, I’m surprised Rick missed the fact that !Boot.!Run runs System prior to checking the CLib version, and that System loads a bunch of stuff, including a suitable CLib.

The boot logging was out of frustration, that doesn’t mean I read (and more importantly remembered) every single resource in every single bit of the startup. After all, apart from a few minor tweaks, the logger is half a decade old. I can’t even remember what animé I watched in 2012……